[Using Sakai] [Management] Looking for feedback on a proposal for a new Wiki integration effort

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 4:58 AM, John Norman <john at caret.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

....

> Personally, I would be more inclined to to develop the entity-picker and page authoring Proof of Concept we did for Sakai 2 as part of the groundwork for Sakai 3. This connects with Chuck Hedrick's course builder work. My reason is that most people don't use a wiki because they want to use a wiki, they use it because they want to create html pages in the system for their audience to read and they want those html pages to be able to incorporate content from within Sakai and from outside Sakai.
>
> We have had a few people saying they want their students to become familiar with wiki syntax, but generally they just want to create pages.

Based on my own experiments in two classes this term (one of about 45
students, and another about 85), I think the aspects of wikis that
show huge pedagogical potential are primarily in the area of
collaborative web authoring, which is more than just individual users
creating pages.

So "wiki syntax" is only an awkward means to that end.

WYSIWYG interfaces have some advantages in this area, but are often
implemented in ways that introduce other problems (like, for example,
blurring structure and presentation, so that most students don't
bother using heading and other structural paragraph tags, and the
result is a mess of a site, with accessibility issues, etc.; also, if
you go this route, you quickly run into students wanting to do more
than you expect as far as formatting).

One thing that gets in the way of collaborative web editing in the
classroom is the lack of synchronous editing support in many wikis.

Also, one overlooked advantage of wikis is the ability to
easily/quickly spin off new, linked, pages. In my wiki assignments,
for example, I have an explicit rubric category that requires student
to create links to different projects within the wiki.

The history change tracking can also be really helpful when doing assessment.

What I'd ultimately like to see is something like a cross between
Google Docs's basic synchronous collaborative editing support
(including the commenting and chat stuff), and the linked page aspects
of a traditional wiki, but pervasive such that it's just a part of
"content creation and editing."

Bruce